Fernando Coronil

Fernando Coronil (November 30, 1944 Caracas – August 16, 2011, New York City) was a Venezuelan anthropologist and historian best known for his study of the politics of oil in Venezuela.

Biography

Fernando Coronil was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on November 30, 1944, to public health professionals Lya Imber de Coronil (1914–1981) and Fernando Rubén Coronil (1911-2004). His mother was of Russian Jewish descent, and was the first woman to graduate from medical school in Venezuela. During her medical career, she served as the director of Caracas's Hospital de Niños. At the University of Chicago, he studied alongside Julie Skurski, Victor Turner, Terrence Turner, Bernard Cohn, and John Coatsworth.

As a part of their Ph.D. fieldwork, Skurski and Coronil had originally planned to conduct research in Cuba. However, Coronil was unable to secure permission from the Cuban government to conduct research in the country. Upon his return to the United States, Coronil was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and subsequently expelled from the country "as a subversive agent, although no specific charges were ever disclosed". At the University of Michigan, Coronil was a member of the Department of Anthropology, the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations, the Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

Coronil left the University of Michigan on December 31, 2008 to take a position as a Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

On August 16, 2011, Fernando Coronil died of lung cancer at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York City. He was 66 years old.

Influences Coronil’s academic work is influenced by leftist postcolonial and anti-imperial literature, poetics, state theory, and Marxist geography.

Major works Coronil's doctoral dissertation, completed in 1987, was entitled The Black El Dorado: Money Fetishism, Democracy, and Capitalism in Venezuela. Like Coronil's later work, the dissertation dealt with the Venezuelan oil economy and its relationship with both state and global politics. The Magical State also discusses how the Venezuelan state is transformed not only by oil, but by the relationship between the state, society, and nature. Coronil's work in The Magical State has influenced academics such as Andrew Apter and Suzana Sawyer, whose own work also mapped the role of oil wealth in influencing cultural practices among nation states.

In 2000, Coronil published an essay entitled Beyond Occidentalism, which refers to the writing of post-colonial Marxist scholar and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon to introduce a geohistorical critique of Western self-conception, as part of a larger deconstruction of the poetics behind imperial geographic ideas.

At the time of his death, Coronil was working on a book entitled Crude Matters, regarding the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the attempted 2002 coup against his administration.